From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
April 1999

Commentary on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC
Part 3: Doctrine of Essence

Editor's Note: The following consists of Part 3 of Raya Dunayevskaya's detailed commentary
on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC. Part 1, on the Prefaces and Introduction to
the LOGIC, and Part 2, on the Doctrine of Being, appeared in our
January-February and March issues. Part 4, on the Doctrine of the Notion,
will appear in the May issue. These notes were first written in 1961 and
appear in print for the first time.

The LOGIC is one of Hegel's most important works and was of great service
to Marx, especially in the writing of CAPITAL. It has taken on new
importance in light of the need to comprehend the logic of contemporary
capitalism and the struggles against it. These notes will serve as an
anchor of a nationwide series of classes News and Letters Committees is
holding on "The Dialectics of Marx's CAPITAL and Today's Global Crises." To
find out about how to participate in them, see the announcement, on page 10.

All material in brackets as well as footnotes has been supplied by the
editors. "SL" and "SLII" refer to the text of the SCIENCE OF LOGIC as
translated by Johnston and Struthers in two volumes (Macmillan, 1929);
"SLM" refers to the translation by A.V. Miller (Humanities Press, 1969).
The references to Lenin are to his 1914-15 commentary on Hegel's LOGIC, the
first such study done by a Marxist, referred to as "LCW 38."

Dunayevskaya's text has been slightly shortened, indicated by the use of
ellipses. THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 2806.

by Raya Dunayevskaya, founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.

Book Two: The Doctrine of Essence

Section One: Essence As Reflection Into Self

Chapter I: Show

The profundity of Hegel is seen in the fact that even where he thinks that
something is relatively unessential and is, therefore, mere show, that even
there the show is also objective. He considers [that] "show, then, is the
PHENOMENON of skepticism...skepticism did not dare to affirm 'it is';
modern idealism did not dare to regard cognition as a knowledge of
Thing-in-itself" [SLII, p. 22; SLM, p. 396].

Hegel hits out against all idealisms, of Leibniz, Kant, or Fichte. Hegel
writes, "It is the immediacy of NOT-BEING, which constitutes Show; but this
Not-Being is nothing else than the Negativity of Essence in itself" [SLII,
p. 23; SLM, p. 397].

In fact, [in his comments] on the page before [Hegel] said this, when he
criticized both skepticism and idealism, Lenin noted: "You include all the
manifold riches of the world in SCHEIN [show] and you reject the
objectivity of SCHEIN!!" [LCW 38, p. 131]. And again: "Show is Essence in
one of its determinations. . . Essence thus appears. Show is the phenomenon
of Essence in itself" [LCW 38, p. 133]. Lenin further notes that in this
section on the Reflection of Essence, Hegel again accuses Kant of
subjectivism and insists on the objective validity of Show, "of the
immediate given," and notes: "The term, 'GIVEN' is common with Hegel in
general. The little philosophers dispute whether one should take as basis
the Essence or the immediately given (Kant, Hume, Machists(1)). Hegel
substitutes AND for 'or' and explains the concrete content of this 'and'"
[LCW 38, p. 134].

Chapter II: The Essentialities or Determinations of Reflection

We will deal here with the three developments in Essence: first, simple
self-relation or Identity; secondly, Variety [Difference]; and thirdly,
Contradiction. But before Hegel develops these three, he has an observation
on so-called "Laws of Thought," which allegedly prove that A cannot be at
one and the same time A and not be A. That is absolutely hilarious.
"Category, according to its etymology and its Aristotelian definition, is
that which is predicated or asserted of the existent. -But a
determinateness of Being is essentially a transition into the opposite; the
negative of any determinateness is as necessary as the determinateness
itself; and each immediate determinateness is immediately opposed by the
other" [SLII, p. 36; SLM, p. 410].

When Hegel gets to Observation Two, which [Aristotle] called the Law of the
Excluded Middle, he again hits out at the idea that something either is or
is not A, that there is no third, insisting that there IS a third in the
very thesis since A can be both +A and -A: "The something thus is itself
the third term which was supposed to be excluded" [SLII, p. 66; SLM, p.
439], At this point, Lenin remarked: "This is very profound. Every concrete
thing, every concrete something stands in diverse and often contradictory
relations to all others, ergo, it is itself and another" [LCW 38, p. 138].

As for the observation which follows on the law of Contradiction where
Hegel defines Contradiction as the "root of all movement and life, and it
is only insofar as it contains a Contradiction that anything moves and has
impulse and activity" [SLII, p. 67; SLM, p. 439], Lenin copies out in toto
this entire section, at the end of which he makes his famous generalization
that the idea of movement and change was disclosed in 1813 by Hegel, that
is, by philosophy, and was applied by Marx first in 1847 and by Darwin in
1859 [LCW 38, p. 141].

Indeed, Lenin can hardly stop himself from becoming a complete Hegelian and
stressing over and over again how stupid it is to think that Hegel is
abstract and abstruse, and how profound is the concept of Contradiction as
the force of Movement and how different Thinking, Reason, Notion is to
ordinary understanding: "Thinking reason (notion) sharpens the blunted
difference of variety, the mere manifold of imagination, to the ESSENTIAL
difference, to OPPOSITION. Only when the contradictions reach their peak
does manifoldness become mobile (REGSAM) and lively in relation to the
other,-acquire that negativity which is the INNER-PULSATION OF
SELF-MOVEMENT AND LIFE." [Cf. LCW 38, p. 143; SLII, p. 69; SLM, p. 422]

Chapter III: Ground

The very first sentence-"Essence determines itself as Ground" [SLII, p. 71;
SLM, p. 444]-lets us know that we are approaching the climax to Section One
of Essence. As soon as Hegel, in the first observation on the Law of
Ground, finishes his critique of Leibniz's Law of Sufficient Ground, he
develops, in Absolute Ground, all the essentials of Form and Essence, Form
and Matter, Form and Content where it becomes quite clear that these cannot
be separated; that Form and Matter "presuppose one another" [SLII, p. 79;
SLM, p. 452] and Content is the "unity" of Form and Matter [SLII, p. 82;
SLM, p. 454]. And as we move from Absolute to Determined [Determinate]
Ground and approach Complete Ground, it becomes quite clear that
manifoldness or content-determinations could be used indiscriminately so
that you could cite something as much FOR as AGAINST something, which is
exactly what Socrates correctly argued against as Sophistry, because, of
course, such conclusions do not exhaust the thing-in-itself in the sense of
"grasp of the connection of things which contain them all" [SLII, p. 94;
SLM, p. 466].

It is at this point that we reach the transition from Ground to Condition,
which moves Lenin to say, "brilliant: all-world, all-sided LIVING
connection of everything with everything else, and of the reflection of
this connection-MATERIALISTISCH AUF DEN KOPF GESTELLTER HEGEL [Hegel
materialistically turned on his head]-in the concept of man, which must be
so polished, so broken-in, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually-tied-in,
united in opposition, as to embrace the world. The continuation of the work
of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical working out of the
history of human thought, science and technique." And at the same spot,
Lenin rethinks Marx's CAPITAL, thus: "And a 'purely logical' working out?
DAS FALLT ZUSAMMEN [It coincides]. It MUST coincide as does induction and
deduction in CAPITAL" [LCW 38, p. 146].

We have now reached the third sub-section of Ground-Condition, which could
be defined as History. In 1950, G. [Grace Lee] wrote quite a good letter on
that sub-section, but C. L. R. James was no help whatsoever; indeed, he
could never develop the strong point of Grace on philosophy. But we can
gain something by quoting her letter at this point: "The essenceof Hegel's
argument is this: It is necessary to get rid of the concept of Ground as a
SUBSTRATUM, but when you get rid of this concept of something BEHIND the
immediate you have not by any means gotten rid of the fact that the
immediate is the result of a MEDIATING process. It is the self-mediating,
self-repelling, self-transcending relation of Ground which externalizes
itself in the immediate existent. Hence the relentless phrasing and
rephrasing of his thesis that 'The Fact Emerges Out of Ground.'"(2)

The exact statement from Hegel reads: "When all the Conditions of a fact
are present, it enters into Existence. The fact is before it EXISTS. . . "
[SLII, p. 105; SLM, p. 477].

Now at this point, Lenin wrote: "Very good! What has the Absolute Idea and
Idealism to find here? Remarkable, this 'derivation' of Existence" [LCW 38,
p. 147]. We may be bold enough to answer the question, or better still,
recognize that Lenin answered his own question when he reached the last
part of Hegel precisely on the Absolute Idea, and therefore noted: (1) That
one must read the WHOLE of the LOGIC to understand CAPITAL; (2) that man's
cognition not only reflects the world, but "creates" it; (3) and noted in
his conclusions that there was more sense in Idealism than in vulgar
materialism, which made him so anxious to try to get the ENCYCLOPEDIA
GRANAT to return his essay on Marx, so that he could expand the section on
dialectics.

I want to return to the question of Condition as History, as well as to the
expression that "The Fact IS before it EXISTS." The History that Hegel had
in mind was, of course, the historic period in which he lived, following
the French Revolution, which brought not the millennium, but new
contradictions, i.e., philosophically speaking, Ground had been transformed
into Condition and we did get a totality of Movement-the Fact-in-itself.
The new contradictions will once again show that facts, facts, facts can
also hide[:] "the unity of Form is submerged" [SLII, p. 104; SLM, p. 475].

And of course we know that our historic epoch, much more than Hegel's,
demands more of reality than just a sound of "immediates."(3) For example,
scientifically with Einstein, we get to know that facts, too, are relative.
So that once again we need self-transcendence and therefore, in the
expression "the fact is before it exists," we recognize the process of
emergence of something new, and in its emergence we therefore get the
transition to Existence. In our terms, if we think of the actual historical
development of the working class in Marx's CAPITAL, we have "Ground in
Unity with its Condition."

Section Two: Appearance

Here again, the very first sentence is a leap forward: "Essence must
appear" [SLII, p. 107; SLM, p. 479]. So we can no longer merely contrast
Appearance to Essence, because, while there may be much Appearance that is
only "show," it also contains Essence itself (which in turn will soon mean
we are moving to a real crisis or Actuality).

(I might state that Sartre's Existentialism is nowhere near this important
section of Hegel's LOGIC, for in Hegel "whatever exists has a Ground and is
conditioned" [SLII, p. 109; SLM, p. 481], whereas in Sartre, both the
Ground and the Condition are quite subordinate to the Ego's disgust with it
all.)(4)

The real tendency, as well as actuality, that we should have before us in
studying this section on Appearance is Stalinism and its non-essential
critique in Trotskyism. That is to say, if Essence-the present stage of
capitalism or the present stage of the counter-revolutionary appearance of
the labor bureaucracy-must appear, then Stalinism, which has appeared, is
not just any old bureaucracy that has no connection with a new economic
state of world development. On the contrary, the Appearance-Stalinism-and
the Essence-state-capitalism-are one and the same, or the Form of a new
Content. Trotskyism, on the other hand, by putting up a Chinese wall
between what is mere Appearance to what is true Essence (and to him, the
Essence is not capitalism, but the form of workers' state) has not been
able to analyze either Stalinism or state-capitalism. I mean, either
Stalinism as a mere perversion of the early Soviets, or Stalinism as the
absolute opposite of that early workers' state.5

To get back to Hegel and Lenin's notes on Hegel, Lenin is quite impressed
with Hegel's Analysis of the Law of Appearance, the World of Appearance and
the World-in-Itself, and the Dissolution of Appearance, which are the
sub-sections of Chapter II of this section.

Lenin keeps stressing at this point "the remarkably materialistic" analysis
that flows from this objective analysis which will, of course, become the
basis of Marx's analysis of the economic laws of capitalism. When Hegel
writes "Law, then, is essential appearance" [SLII, p. 133; SLM, p. 504],
Lenin concludes, "Ergo, Law and Essence of Concept are homogeneous (of one
order) or, more correctly, uniform, expressing the deepening of man's
knowledge of Appearance, the world, etc." [LCW 38, p. 152]. Finally, "The
essence here is that both the World of Appearance and the World which is in
and for itself are essentially MOMENTS of knowledge of nature by man,
stages, changes or deepening (of knowledge). The movement of the world in
itself ever further and further FROM the world of appearance-that is what
is not yet visible in Hegel. NB. Do not the 'moments' of conception with
Hegel have significance of 'moments' of transition?" [LCW 38, p. 153].

Chapter III: Essential Relation

The relationship of the Whole and the Parts, you may recall from my various
lectures on Hegel, has to me been a key, not merely to this section of
Hegel, but to the entire philosophy of both Hegel and Marx. Thus, when I
say that the whole is not only the sum total of the parts, but has a pull
on the parts that are not yet there, even as the future has a pull on the
present, it is obvious that we have moved from abstract philosophic
conceptions to the actual world, and form the actual world back again to
philosophy, but this time as enriched by the actual.

As Hegel puts it, "the Whole and the Parts therefore CONDITION each other"
[SLII, p. 145; SLM, p. 515], "the Whole is equal to the Parts and the Parts
to the Whole. . . But further, although the Whole is equal to the Parts, it
is not equal TO THEM as Parts; the Whole is reflected unity" [SLII, p. 146;
SLM, pp. 515-16]. "Thus, the relation of Whole and Parts has passed over
into a relation of Force(6) and its Manifestation" [SLII, p. 147; SLM, p.
517]. Indeed, we will move from that to the relation of Outer and Inner,(7)
which will become the transition to Substance and Actuality.

On the relationship of Outer and Inner, Lenin stresses what he calls "the
unexpected slipping in of the CRITERIA of Hegel's Dialectic"-where Hegel
notes that the relationship of Inner and Outer is apparent "in every
natural, scientific, and, generally, intellectual development" [SLII, p.
157; SLM, p. 526]-and Lenin concludes, therefore, "that is where lies the
SEED of the deep truth in the mystical balderdash of Hegelianism!" [LCW 38,
p. 155].

Section Three: Actuality

The introductory note will stress that "Actuality is the UNITY OF ESSENCE
AND EXISTENCE. . . This unity of Inner and Outer is ABSOLUTE ACTUALITY." He
will divide Actuality into Possibility and Necessity as the "formal
moments" of the Absolute, or its reflection. And finally, the unity of this
Absolute and its reflection will become the Absolute Relation "or, rather,
the Absolute as relation to itself, -SUBSTANCE" [SLII, p. 160; SLM, p.
529].

At this point in the Preliminary Note [on the Absolute], Lenin gets quite
peeved at the idealist in Hegel and he divides the expression that "there
is no becoming in the Absolute" [SLII, p. 162; SLM, p. 531] into two
sentences by stating "and other nonsense about the Absolute" [LCW 38, p.
156]. But, as usual, it will not be long before Lenin is full of praise of
Hegel and his section on Actuality.

To me, the most important part of Chapter I of Section Three, the Absolute,
is the Observation [SLII, p. 167-72; SLM, pp. 536-40] on the philosophy of
Spinoza: "DETERMINATENESS IS NEGATION-this is the absolute principle of
Spinoza's philosophy, and this true and simple insight is the foundation of
the absolute unity of Substance. But Spinoza does not pass on beyond
negation as determinateness or quality to a recognition of it as absolute,
that is, self-negating, negation" [SLII, p. 168; SLM, p. 536]. Hegel's
conclusion is that though the dialectic is in it until Spinoza gets to
Substance, it there stops: "Substance lacks the principle of Personality"
[SLII, p. 168; SLM, p. 537]. And again later Hegel writes: "In a similar
manner in the Oriental idea of EMANATION the Absolute is self-illuminating
light" [SLII, p. 170; SLM, p. 538].

From now on, the polemical movement in the LOGIC will take a very
subordinate place; the observations will do the same. Indeed, for the rest
of the entire work, Hegel will have only two observations, as contrasted to
the beginning of the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, where after but one single page on
Being, he had no less than four observations (really five when you consider
the one on Transcendence of Becoming) which took up no less than 23 pages.

In a word, the closer he approaches the Notion, especially the Absolute
Idea, that is to say, the climax of his system as it has been
comprehensively and profoundly developed both historically and polemically,
the more he has absorbed all that is of value in the other systems of
philosophy, rejected that which is not, and presented a truly objective
worldview of history and philosophy, which contains the elements of a
future society inherent in the present. (We will return to this point at
the end.)

Of Chapter II on Actuality, the categories dealt with-Contingency, or
formal Actuality, Possibility and Necessity-are all to pave the way to
Chapter III, the Absolute Relation, which is the apex of the Doctrine of
Essence and will bring us to the Notion.

Lenin begins to free himself of any residue of taking the empiric concrete
as the Real or Actual. Near [Hegel's discussion of] the question of the
relationship of Substantiality and Causality, Lenin writes: "On the one
hand, we must deepen the knowledge of matter to the knowledge (to the
concept) of substance, in order to find the causes of appearance. On the
other hand, actual knowledge of causes is the deepening of knowledge from
externality of appearance to substance. Two types of examples should
explain this: (1) out of the history of natural science and (2) from the
history of philosophy. More precisely: not 'examples' should be
here-COMPARISON N'EST PAS RAISON [comparison is not proof], -but the
QUINTESSENCE of the one and the other history-plus the history of
technique" [LCW 38, p. 159].

A couple of pages later, Lenin will note that Hegel "FULLY leads up to
History under Causality" and again, that the ordinary understanding of
Causality fails to see that it is "only a small part of the universal
connection" [LCW 38, p. 160] and that the small part is not subjective, but
the objectively real connection. Indeed, Lenin very nearly makes fun, along
with Hegel, of course, of Cause and Effect. Where Hegel wrote, "Effect
therefore is necessary just because it is manifestation of Cause, or
because it is that Necessity which is Cause" [SLII, p. 192; SLM, p. 559],
Lenin noted that, of course, both Cause and Effect are "only Moments of the
universal interdependence, of the universal concatenation of events, only
links in the chain of the development of Matter" [LCW 38, p. 159]. And by
the time he has finished with this chapter and met up with Hegel's
definition of the next and final part of the Logic, the Notion, "the Realm
of Subjectivity or of Freedom" [SLII, p. 205; SLM, p. 571], Lenin
translates this without any self-consciousness over the word "Subjective,"
as follows: "NB-Freedom=subjectivity ("or") goal, consciousness, striving"
[LCW 38, p. 164].

It is important to note that Herbert Marcuse in his REASON AND REVOLUTION
also chooses this, not only as the climax, which it is, to the Doctrine of
Essence, but more or less as the Essence of the whole of Hegelian
philosophy. Thus, on p. 153, he states, "Without a grasp of the distinction
between Reality and Actuality, Hegel's philosophy is meaningless in its
decisive principles."

NOTES

"Machists" refers to the followers of Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Austrian
physicist and philosopher who argued that all knowledge is a conceptual
organization of the data of sensory experience.

This letter of March 22, 1950 has not been located, but extracts of it
appear in notes later prepared by Dunayevskaya. See SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAYA
DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 14670-72.

Hegel writes in the same paragraph that "the immediacy of Being
essentially is only a moment of Form" [SLII, p. 104; SLM, p. 476].

A reference to Sartre's BEING AND NOTHINGNESS.

Compare the discussion of form and essence in Dunayevskaya's 1949 "Notes
on Chapter 1 of Marx's CAPITAL: Its Relation to Hegel's Logic," in
Dunayevskaya, THE MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM, pp. 89-94.

For Hegel, matter and substances do not simply possess various forces
(such as weight or magnetism), they also are forces. This is in keeping
with his overall view that we cannot adequately apprehend the world as
substance only, but must eventually view it also as subject. Force is not
yet subject, but it does convey motion and change, rather than simple inert
substantiality.

Hegel writes in his observation on "the immediate identity of inner and
outer" that they are not so separate as common sense would believe, for
"each immediately is not only its other but also the totality of the whole"
[SLII, p. 157; SLM, p. 526].